Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Volume 86
Issue 1 Fall
Article 8
Fall 1995
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THE JOURNAL OF
INTRODUCTION
Crime victims used to be ignored by criminologists. Then, beginning slowly in the 1940s and more rapidly in the 1970s, interest in the
victim's role in crime grew. Yet a tendency to treat the victim as either
a passive target of another person's wrongdoing or as a virtual accomplice of the criminal limited this interest. The concept of the victimprecipitated homicide' highlighted the possibility that victims were
not always blameless and passive targets, but that they sometimes initiated or contributed to the escalation of a violent interaction through
their own actions, which they often claimed were defensive.
Perhaps due to an unduly narrow focus on lower-class male-onmale violence, scholars- have shown little openness to the possibility
that a good deal of "defensive" violence by persons claiming the moral
status of a victim may be just that. Thus, many scholars routinely assumed that a large share of violent interactions are "mutual combat"
involving two blameworthy parties who each may be regarded as both
offender and victim. The notion that much violence is one-sided and
that many victims of violence are largely blameless is dismissed as
naive.
A few criminologists have rejected the simplistic mutual combat
model of violence, though they sometimes limit its rejection to a few
special subtypes of violence, especially family violence, rape, and,
more generally, violence of men against women and of adults against
* The authors wish to thank David Bordua, Gary Mauser, Seymour Sudman, andJames
Wright for their help in designing the survey instrument. The authors also wish to thank
the highly skilled staff responsible for the interviewing- Michael Trapp (Supervisor), David
Antonacci, James Belcher, Robert Bunting, Melissa Cross, Sandy Hawker, Dana R. Jones,
Harvey Langford, Jr., Susannah R Maher, Nia Mastin-Walker, Brian Murray, Miranda Ross,
Dale Sellers, Esty Zervigon, and for sampling work, Sandy Grguric.
I MARVIN E. WOLFGANG, PATRNs IN CRIMINAL HOMICIDE 245 (1958).
150
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children. 2 However, the more one looks, the more exceptions become evident, such as felony killings linked with robberies, burglaries,
or sexual assaults, contract killings, mass killings, serial murders, and
homicides where the violence is one-sided. Indeed, it may be more
accurate to see the mutual combat common among lower-class males
to be the exception rather than the rule. If this is so, then forceful
actions taken by victims are easier to see as genuinely and largely
defensive.
Once one turns to defensive actions taken by the victims of property crimes, it is even easier to take this view. There are few robberies,
burglaries, larcenies, or auto thefts where it is hard to distinguish offender from victim or to identify one of the parties as the clear initiator of a criminal action and another party as a relatively legitimate
responder to those initiatives. The traditional conceptualization of
victims as either passive targets or active collaborators overlooks another possible victim role, that of the active resister who does not initiate or accelerate any illegitimate activity, but uses various means of
resistance for legitimate purposes, such as avoiding injury or property
loss.
Victim resistance can be passive or verbal, but much of it is active
and forceful. Potentially, the most consequential form of forceful
resistance is armed resistance, especially resistance with a gun. This
form of resistance is worthy of special attention for many reasons,
both policy-related and scientific. The policy-related reasons are obvious: if self-protection with a gun is commonplace, it means that any
form of gun control that disarms large numbers of prospective victims, either altogether, or only in certain times and places where victimization might occur, will carry significant social costs in terms of
lost opportunities for self-protection.
On the other hand, the scientific reasons are likely to be familiar
only to the relatively small community of scholars who study the consequences of victim self-protection: the defensive actions of crime victims have significant effects on the outcomes of crimes, and the effects
of armed resistance differ from those of unarmed resistance. Previous
research has consistently indicated that victims who resist with a gun
or other weapon are less likely than other victims to lose their property in robberies3 and in burglaries. 4 Consistently, research also has
2 Richard A. Berk et al., Mutual Combat and Other Family Vwlence Myths, in THE DARK
SIDE OF FAsmiS 197 (David Finkelhor et al. eds., 1983).
3 See generally MIcHAELJ. HINDELANG, CRIMNAL VicrIMzATION IN EirHT AMERICAN Crrmzs (1976); Gary Kleck, Crime Control Through the PrivateUse ofArmed Force, 35 Soc. PROBS. 1
(1988); Gary KIeck & Miriam A. DeLone, Vwtim Resistance and Offender Weapon Effects in
Robbery, 9 J. QUANTrATrvE CRIMINOLOGY 55 (1993); Eduard A. Ziegenhagen & Dolores
152
[Vol. 86
indicated that victims who resist by using guns or other weapons are
less likely to be injured compared to victims who do not resist or to
those who resist without weapons. This is true whether the research
relied on victim surveys or on police records, and whether the data
analysis consisted of simple cross-tabulations or more complex multivariate analyses. These findings have been obtained with respect to
robberies 5 and to assaults. 6 Cook 7 offers his unsupported personal
opinion concerning robbery victims that resisting with a gun is only
prudent if the robber does not have a gun. The primary data source
on which Cook relies flatly contradicts this opinion. National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS) data indicate that even in the very disadvantageous situation where the robber has a gun, victims who resist
with guns are still substantially less likely to be injured than those who
resist in other ways, and even slightly less likely to be hurt than those
8
who do not resist at all.
With regard to studies of rape, although samples typically include
too few cases of self-defense with a gun for separate analysis, McDermott,9 Quinsey and Upfold, 10 Lizotte," and Kleck and Sayles 12 all
found that victims who resisted with some kind of weapon were less
likely to have the rape attempt completed against them. Findings
concerning the impact of armed resistance on whether rape victims
suffer additional injuries beyond the rape itself are less clear, due to a
lack of information on whether acts of resistance preceded or followed the rapist's attack. The only two rape studies with the necessary
sequence information found that forceful resistance by rape victims
usually follows, rather than precedes, rapist attacks inflicting additional injury, undercutting the proposition that victim resistance increases the likelihood that the victim will be hurt. 13 This is consistent
4
with findings on robbery and assault.'
Brosnan, Vrictim Responses to Robbery and Crime Control Policy, 23 CRIMINOLOGY 675 (1985).
4 See generallyPhilipJ. Cook, The Technology of PersonalViolence, 14 CRIME &JusT.: ANN.
REv. Rrs. 1, 57 (1991).
5 Ziegenhagen & Brosnan, supra note 3; Kleck supra note 3; Kleck & DeLone, supra
note 3.
6 Kleck, supra note 3.
7 Cook, supra note 4, at 58.
8 Kleck & DeLone, supra note 3, at 75.
9 JOAN M. MCDERMOTT, RAPE VicrIMIZArsON IN 26 AMERICAN CrrIEs (1979).
10 Quinsey & Upfold, Rape Completion and Vctim Injury as a Function of Female Resistance
Strategy, 17 CAN. J. BEHAV. Si. 40 (1985).
11 Alan J. Lizotte, Determinantsof CompletingRape and Assault, 2 J. QUANTIrATIVE CRIMINOLOGY 203 (1986).
12 Gary Kleck & Susan Sayles, Rape and Resistance, 37 Soc. PROBS. 149 (1990).
1S Quinsey & Upfold, supranote 10, at 46-47. See generallySarah E. Ullman & Raymond
A. Knight, FightingBack: Women's Resistance to Rape, 7J. INTER'ERSONAL VIOLENCE 31 (1992).
14 See Kleck, supra note 3, at 9.
1995]
II.
(DGU)
IN PREVIOUS
SURVEYS
A.
However consistent the evidence may be concerning the effectiveness of armed victim resistance, there are some who minimize its significance by insisting that it is rare.15 This assertion is invariably based
entirely on a single source of information, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
Data from the NCVS imply that each year there are only about
68,000 defensive uses of guns in connection with assaults and robberies, 16 or about 80,000 to 82,000 if one adds in uses linked with household burglaries. 17 These figures are less than one ninth of the
estimates implied by the results of at least thirteen other surveys, summarized in Table 1, most of which have been previously reported.' 8
The NGVS estimates imply that about 0.09 of 1% of U.S. households
experience a defensive gun use (DGU) in any one year, compared to
the Mauser survey's estimate of 3.79% of households over a five year
period, or about 0.76% in any one year, assuming an even distribution
over the five year period, and no repeat uses. 19
The strongest evidence that a measurement is inaccurate is that it
is inconsistent with many other independent measurements or observations of the same phenomenon; indeed, some would argue that this
is ultimately the only way of knowing that a measurement is wrong.
Therefore, one might suppose that the gross inconsistency of the
NCVS-based estimates with all other known estimates, each derived
from sources with no known flaws even remotely substantial enough
to account for nine-to-one, or more, discrepancies, would be sufficient
to persuade any serious scholar that the NCVS estimates are
unreliable.
Apparently it is not, since the Bureau of Justice Statistics continues to disseminate their DGU estimates as if they were valid, 20 and
scholars continue to cite the NCVS estimates as being at least as rea15 Cook, supra note 4; David McDowall & Brian Wiersema, TheIncidc ofDefensive Firearm Use by U.S. Crime rctirms, 1987 Through 1990, 84 AM.J. PUB. HEALTH 1982 (1994); UNDEPSTANDING AND PREVENTING VIOLENCE 265 (AlbertJ. Reiss &Jeffrey A. Roth eds., 1993).
16 Kleck, supra note 3, at 8.
17 Cook, supranote 4, at 56; MICHAEL P. RAND, BUREAU OFJUSTICE STATISTICS, GUNS AND
CIME (Crime Data Brief) (1994).
18 See Kleck, supra note 3, at 3; GARY KLECK, Pon-Tr BLANxI GUNS AND VIOLENCE IN
AMERICA 146 (1991).
19 Gary A. Mauser, Firearms and Self-Defense: The Canadian Case, Presented at the
Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology (Oct. 28, 1993).
20 RAND, supra note 17.
[Vol. 86
1995]
.155
hold they contact 2 5 In short, it is made very clear to Rs that they are,
in effect, speaking to a law enforcement arm of the federal government, whose employees know exactly who the Rs and their family
members are, where they live, and how they can be recontacted.
Even under the best of circumstances, reporting the use of a gun
for self-protection would be an extremely sensitive and legally controversial matter for either of two reasons. As with other forms of forceful resistance, the defensive act itself, regardless of the characteristics
of any weapon used, might constitute an unlawful assault or at least
the R might believe that others, including either legal authorities or
the researchers, could regard it that way. Resistance with a gun also
involves additional elements of sensitivity. Because guns are legally
regulated, a victim's possession of the weapon, either in general or at
the time of the DGU, might itself be unlawful, either in fact or in the
mind of a crime victim who used one. More likely, lay persons with a
limited knowledge of the extremely complicated law of either self-defense or firearms regulation are unlikely to know for sure whether
their defensive actions or their gun possession was lawful.
It is not hard for gun-using victims interviewed in the NCVS to
withhold information about their use of a gun, especially since they
are never directly asked whether they used a gun for self-protection. They are
asked only general questions about whether they did anything to protect themselves.2 6 In short, Rs are merely given the opportunity to
volunteer the information that they have used a gun defensively. All it
takes for an R to conceal a DGU is to simply refrain from mentioning
it, i.e., to leave it out of what may be an otherwise accurate and complete account of the crime incident.
Further, Rs in the NCVS are not even asked the general self-protection question unless they already independently indicated that they
had been a victim of a crime. This means that any DGUs associated
with crimes the Rs did not want to talk about would remain hidden. It
has been estimated that the NCVS may catch less than one-twelfth of
spousal assaults and one-thirty-third of rapes, 2 7 thereby missing nearly
all DGUs associated with such crimes.
In the context of a nonanonymous survey conducted by the fed25 U.S. BuREAu OF THE CENSUS, NATIONAL CRIME SURVEY. INTERViEvER'S MANUAL,
NCS-
search Council).
[Vol. 86
eral government, an R who reports a DGU may believe that he is placing himself in serious legal jeopardy. For example, consider the issue
of the location of crimes. For all but a handful of gun owners with a
permit to carry a weapon in public places (under 4% of the adult
population even in states like Florida, where carry permits are relatively easy to get) 28 , the mere possession of a gun in a place other than
lished paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology)
1995]
things which the Rs themselves have done. Therefore, it is neither surprising, nor a reflection on the survey's designers, to note that the
NCVS is singularly ill-suited for estimating the prevalence or incidence of DGU. It is not credible to regard this survey as an acceptable
basis for establishing, in even the roughest way, how often Americans
use guns for self-protection.
B.
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(1978);
1995]
[Vol. 86
1.
Methods
The present survey is the first survey ever devoted to the subject
of armed self-defense. It was carefully designed to correct all -ofthe
known correctable or avoidable flaws of previous surveys which critics
have identified. We use the most anonymous possible national survey
format, the anonymous random digit dialed telephone survey. We did
not know the identities of those who were interviewed, and made this
fact clear to the Rs. We interviewed a large nationally representative
sample covering all adults, age eighteen and over, in the lower fortyeight states and living in households with telephones. 42 We asked
DGU questions of all Rs in our sample, asking them separately about
both their own DGU experiences and those of other members of their
households. We used both a five year recall period and a one year
recall period. We inquired about uses of both handguns and other
types of guns, and excluded occupational uses of guns and uses
against animals. Finally, we asked a long series of detailed questions
designed to establish exactly what Rs did with their guns; for example,
if they had confronted other humans, and how had each DGU connected to a specific crime or crimes.
We consulted with North America's most experienced experts on
gun-related surveys, David Bordua, James Wright, and Gary Mauser,
along with survey expert Seymour Sudman, in order to craft a state-ofthe-art survey instrument designed specifically to establish the frequency and nature of DGUs. 43 A professional telephone polling firm,
41 Kleck, supranote 39.
42 Completed interviews, n=4,977.
43 See, e.g., DAVID J. BORDUA ET AL., ILLINOIS LAW ENFORCEMENT COMMISSION, PATTERNS
OF ]FIREARMS OWNERSHIP, REGULATION AND USE IN ILLINOIS (1979); SEYMORE SUDMAN & NORMAN BRADBURN, RESPONSE EFFECTS IN SURVEYS (1974);JAMEs WRIGHT & PETER Rossi, ARMED
AND CONSIDERED DANGEROUS (1986); AlanJ. Lizotte & DavidJ. Bordua, Firearms Ownership
for Sport andProtection, 46 AM. Soc. REV. 499 (1980); Gary Mauser, A Comparison of Canadian
1995]
[Vol. 86
months?" At this point, Rs were asked "Was it you who used a gun defensively, or did someone else in your household do this?"
All Rs reporting a DGU were asked a long, detailed series of questions establishing exactly what happened in the DGU incident. Rs
who reported having experienced more than one DGU in the previous five years were asked about their most recent experience. When
the original R was the one who had used a gun defensively, as was
usually the case, interviewers obtained his or her firsthand account of
the event. When the original R indicated that some other member of
the household was the one who had the -experience, interviewers
made every effort to speak directly to the involved person, either
speaking to that person immediately or obtaining times and dates to
call back. Up to three call-backs were made to contact the DGU-involved person. We anticipated that it would sometimes prove impossible to make contact with these persons, so interviewers were
instructed to always obtain a proxy account of the DGU from the original R, on the assumption that a proxy account would be better than
none at all. It was rarely necessary to rely on these proxy accountsonly six sample cases of DGUs were reported through proxies, out of a
total of 222 sample cases.
While all Rs reporting a DGU were given the full interview, only a
one-third random sample of Rs not reporting a DGU were interviewed. The rest were simply thanked for their help. This procedure
helped keep interviewing costs down. In the end, there were 222 completed interviews with Rs reporting DGUs, another 1,610 Rs not reporting a DGU but going through the full interview by answering
questions other than those pertaining to details of the DGUs. There
were a total of 1,832 cases with the full interview. An additional 3,145
Rs answered only enough questions to establish that no one in their
household had experienced a DGU against a human in the previous
five years (unweighted totals). These procedures effectively undersampled for non-DGU Rs or, equivalently, oversampled for DGU-involved Rs. Data were also weighted to account for this oversampling.
Questions about the details of DGU incidents permitted us to establish whether a given DGU met all of the following qualifications for
an incident to be treated as a genuine DGU: (1) the incident involved
defensive action against a human rather than an animal, but not in
connection with police, military, or security guard duties; (2) the incident involved actual contact with a person, rather than merely investigating suspicious circumstances, etc.; (3) the defender could state a
specific crime which he thought was being committed at the time of
the incident; (4) the gun was actually used in some way-at a minimum it had to be used as part of a threat against a person, either by
19951
164
[Vol. 86
The methods used to compute the Table 2 estimates are very simple and straight-forward. Prevalence ("% Used") figures were computed by dividing the weighted sample frequencies in the top two
rows of numbers by the total weighted sample size of 4,977. The estimated number of persons or households who experienced a DGU,
listed in the third and fourth rows, was then computed by multiplying
these prevalence figures by the appropriate U.S. population base, age
eighteen and over for person-based estimates, and the total number of
households for household-based estimates. Finally, the estimated
number of defensive uses was computed by multiplying the number of
DGU-involved persons or households by the following estimates of the
number of all-guns DGU incidents per DGU-involved person or
household, using a past-five-years recall period: person-based, A1.478; person-based, B-1.472; household-based, A-1.531; household-based, B-1.535. We did not establish how many DGUs occurred in the past year, and for past-five-years DGUs, we did not
separately establish how many of the DGUs involved handguns and
how many involved other types of guns. Therefore, for all past-year
estimates, and for past-five-years handgun estimates, it was necessary
to conservatively assume that there was only one DGU per DGU-involved person or household.
The most technically sound estimates presented in Table 2 are
those based on the shorter one-year recall period that rely on Rs' firsthand accounts of their own experiences (person-based estimates).
These estimates appear in the first two columns. They indicate that
each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all
types by civilians against humans, with about 1.5 to 1.9 million of the
incidents involving use of handguns.
These estimates are larger than those derived from the best previous surveys, indicating that technical improvements in the measurement procedures have, contrary to the expectations of Cook,47 Reiss
and Roth, 48 and McDowall and Wiersema, 49 increased rather than decreased estimates of the frequency that DGUs occur. Defensive gun
use is thus just another specific example of a commonplace pattern in
criminological survey work, which includes victimization surveys, selfreport surveys of delinquency, surveys of illicit drug use, etc.: the better the measurement procedures, the higher the estimates of controversial behaviors. 50
The present estimates are higher than earlier ones primarily due
47 Cook, supra note 4.
48 UNDERSTANDING AND PREVENTING VIOLENCE,
DELINQUENCY
(1981).
1995]
[Vol. 86
1995]
years, person; and 0.54% for past five years, household. Given how
small these are already, even increasing samples to the size of the
enormous ones in the NCVS could produce only slight reductions in
sampling error.
Are these estimates plausible? Could it really be true that Americans use guns for self-protection as often as 2.1 to 2.5 million times a
year? The estimate may seem remarkable in comparison to expectations based on conventional wisdom, but it is not implausibly large in
comparison to various gun-related phenomena. There are probably
over 220 million guns in private hands in the U.S., 57 implying that
only about 1% of them are used for defensive purposes in any one
year-not an impossibly high fraction. In a December 1993 Gallup
survey, 49% of U.S. households reported owning a gun, and 31% of
adults reported personally owning one. 58 These figures indicate that
there are about 47.6 million households with a gun, with perhaps 93
million, or 49% of the adult U.S. population living in households with
guns, and about 59.1 million adults personally owning a gun. Again, it
hardly seems implausible that 3% (2.5 million/93 million) of the people with immediate access to a gun could have used one defensively in
a given year.
Huge numbers of Americans not only have access to guns, but
the overwhelming majority of gun owners, if one can believe their
statements, are willing to use a gun defensively. In a December 1989
national survey, 78% of American gun owners stated that they would
not only be willing to use a gun defensively in some way, but would be
willing to shoot a burglar. 59 The percentage willing to use a gun defensively in some way, though not necessarily by shooting someone, would
presumably be even higher than this.
Nevertheless, having access to a gun and being willing to use it
against criminals is not the same"as actually doing so. The latter requires experiencing a crime under circumstances in which the victim
can get to, or already possesses, a gun. We do not know how many
such opportunities for crime victims to use guns defensively occur
each year. It would be useful to know how large a fraction of crimes
with direct offender-victim contact result in a DGU. Unfortunately, a
large share of the incidents covered by our survey are probably
outside the scope of incidents that realistically are likely to be reported to either the NCVS or police. If the DGU incidents reported
in the present survey are not entirely a subset within the pool of cases
57 KLECK, supra note 18, at 50 (extrapolating up to 1994, from 1987 data).
58 David W. Moore & Frank Newport, PublicStrongly FavorsStriterGun Control Laws, 340
THE GALLUP PoLL MONTHLY 18 (1994).
59 Quinley, supra note 36.
[Vol. 86
covered by the NCVS, one cannot meaningfully use NCVS data to estimate the share of crime incidents which result in a DGU. Nevertheless, in a ten state sample of incarcerated felons interviewed in 1982,
34% reported having been "scared off, shot at, wounded or captured
by an armed victim.
' 60
1995]
DGUs any more than there is any value to knowing the exact number
of crimes which are committed each year. The estimates in Table 2
are at best only rough approximations, which are probably too low. It
is sufficient to conclude from these numbers that DGU is very common, far more common than has been recognized to date by criminologists or policy makers, and certainly far more common than one
would think based on any official sources of information.
What does "very common" mean? One natural standard of comparison by which the magnitude of these numbers could be judged is
the frequency with which guns are used for criminal purposes. The
highest annual estimate of criminal gun use for the peak year of gun
crime is the NCVS estimate for 1992, when there were an estimated
847,652 violent crime incidents in which, according to the victim, at
least one offender possessed a gun.6 This NCVS figure is not directly
comparable with our DGU estimates because our DGU estimates are
restricted only to incidents in which the gun was actually used by the
defender, as opposed to incidents in which a victim merely possessed
a gun. Many of the "gun .crimes" in the NCVS, on the other hand, do
not involve the gun actually being used by the criminal. Thus, the
NCVS estimate of "gun crimes" overstates the number of crimes in
which the offender actually used the gun. The only "gun crimes" reported in NCVS interviews that one can be confident involved offenders actually using guns are those in which they shot at a victim; but
these were only 16.6% of "handgun crimes" reported in the NCVS
from 1987 to 1992.65
OF JUSTICE STATISTICS,
U.S.
[Vol. 86
tion at all that the gun allegedly possessed by the offender was actually
used.
Even the presence of a weapon is debatable, since victims are not
asked why they thought the offender possessed a gun or if they saw a
gun. This raises the possibility that some victims assumed that the offender had a gun, or inferred it from a bulge in the offender's clothing, or accepted the word of an offender who was bluffing about
having a gun.
Thus, somewhere between 16.6% and 63.4%69 of NCVS-defined
"handgun crime" victimizations involve the gun actually being used in
an attack or threat. Applying these figures to the estimates of 847,652
gun crime incidents and 689,652 handgun crime incidents, we can be
confident that in 1992 there were at least 140,710 nonfatal crime incidents in which offenders used guns, 114,482 with handguns or about
157,000 total gun crime incidents, and 129,000 with handguns, when
one includes gun homicides. 70 Or, generously assuming that all of the
ambiguous "weapon present" cases involved guns being used to
threaten the victim, estimates of 554,000 total, fatal and nonfatal, gun
crime incidents and 451,000 handgun crime incidents are obtained.
All of these estimates are well short of even the most conservative
estimates of DGUs in Table 2. The best estimates of DGUs (first two
columns), even if compared to the more generous estimates of gun
crimes, are 4.6 times higher than the crime counts for all guns, and
4.2 times higher for handguns, or 3.9 and 3.4, respectively, if the more
conservative B estimates of DGU are used. In sum, DGUs are about
three to five times as common as criminal uses, even using generous
estimates of gun crimes.
There is good reason to believe that survey estimates of both
criminal and defensive gun uses, including the DGU estimates
presented here, are too low. Cook has shown that NCVS estimates of
gunshot wounds are far too low.7 1 Our estimates of DGUs are proba-
bly also too low, partly because, unlike the NCVS, our survey did not
cover adolescents, the age group most frequently victimized in violence. Furthermore, our use of telephone surveying excludes the 5%
of the nation's households without telephones, households which are
disproportionately poor and/or rural. Low income persons are more
likely to be crime victims, 7 2 while rural persons are more likely to own
69 16.6% plus the 46.8% in the ambiguous "weapon present" category.
70 FEDERAL BuREAu OF INVESTIGATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, CRIME IN THE
18, 58 (1993).
71 PhilipJ. Cook, The Case of the Missing Victims: Gunshot Woundings in the NationalCrime
Survey, 1 J. QUANTITATIVE
CRIMINOLOGY 91 (1985).
1995]
guns and to be geographically distant from the nearest police officer.73 Both groups therefore may have more opportunities to use
guns for self-protection and excluding them from the sample could
contribute to an underestimation of DGU.
Both parameters also are subject to underestimation due to intentional respondent underreporting. It is also probable that typical survey Rs are more reluctant to tell interviewers about questionable acts
that they themselves have committed, such as threatening another
person with a gun for purportedly defensive reasons, than they are to
report criminal acts that other people have committed againstthem.
Assuming this is correct, it would imply that DGUs, even in the best
surveys, are underreported more than gun crime victimizations, and
that correcting for underreporting would only increase the degree to
which DGUs outnumber gun crimes.
The only known significant source of overestimation of DGUs in
this survey is "telescoping," the tendency of Rs to report incidents
which actually happened earlier than the recall period, such as reporting a six year old incident as having happened in the past five years. It
is likely that telescoping effects are more than counterbalanced by Rs
who actually experienced DGUs failing to report them. Nevertheless,
it is worth discussing how much effect telescoping could have on these
estimates. In evaluating the ability of crime victims to recall crime
events in victim surveys, the U.S. Census Bureau selected a sample of
crimes that were reported to the police, and then interviewed the victims of these known crime events. Using a twelve month recall period
(the same as we used in the present survey), they surveyed victims who
had been involved in crimes which had actually occurred thirteen to
fourteen months before the interview, i.e., one or two months before
the recall period. Of these ineligible crimes, 21% were telescoped forward-wrongly reported as having occurred in the twelve month recall period. 74
Since the months just before the start of the recall period will
show the highest rates of telescoping, the rate should be even smaller
for crimes which occurred earlier. Nevertheless, even if it is assumed
that the 21% rate applied to events that occurred as much as one year
earlier, thirteen to twenty-four months before the interview, telescoping could inflate the DGU estimates for a one year recall period by
only 21%. Adjusting the 2.5 million DGU estimate downward for
telescoping effects of this magnitude would reduce it to about 2.1 mil73 KI ECK, supranote 18, at 57.
74 Richard W. Dodge, The Washington, D.C. Recall Study, in 1 Tm NATONAL CRiME SURvEY. WORKIrNG PAPERS: CuRRENT AND IsroaicA L PERSPECTIVES 14 (Robert G. Lehnen &
172
[Vol. 86
A total of 222 sample cases of DGUs against humans were obtained. For nine of these, the R broke off discussion of the incident
before any significant amount of detail could be obtained, other than
that the use was against a human. This left 213 cases with fairly complete information. Although this dataset constitutes the most detailed
body of information available on DGU, the sample size is nevertheless
fairly modest. While estimates of DGU frequency are reliable because
they are based on a very large sample of 4,977 cases, results pertaining
to the details of DGU incidents are based on 213 or fewer sample
cases, and readers should treat these results with appropriate caution.
Apart from the sample size, the results of this survey also are affected by sample censoring. Beyond the incidents our interviewers
were told about, there were almost certainly other DGUs which occurred within the recall period but which Rs did not mention to interviewers. In debriefings by the authors, almost all of our interviewers
reported that they had experienced something like the following: they
asked the key DGU question, which was followed by a long silence on
the other end of the line, and/or the R asking something like "Who
wants to know?" or "Why do you want to know?" or some similarly
suspicious remark, followed by a "no" answer. In contrast, only one
interviewer spoke with a person he thought was inventing a nonexistent incident. One obvious implication is that the true frequency of
DGU is probably even higher than our estimates indicate. Another is
that the incidents which were reported might differ from those that
were not.
We believe that there are two rather different kinds of incidents
that are especially likely to go unreported: (1) cases that Rs do not
want to tell strangers on the phone, because the Rs deem them legally
75 Henry S. Woltman et al., Recall Bias and Telescoping in the National Crime Survey, in 2
THE NATIONAL CRIME SURVEY. WORMNG PAPERS: METHODOLOGICAL STUDIES 810
Lehnen & Wesley G. Skogan eds., 1984); Sudman & Bradburn, supra note 40.
(Robert G.
1995]
the rather modest 8.3% wounding rate we found is probably too high,
and that typical DGUs are less serious or dramatic in their consequences than our data suggest. In any case, the 8.3% figure was pro76 See Table 3, panel A.
77 RAND,supra note 17.
78 WiLLIAM A. GELLER & MICHAEL S. Scorr, POLCE ExECUTrm RESEARCH FORUM,
DEADLY FORCE: WHAT WE KNOW 100-106 (1993).
79 RAND, supra note 17.
[Vol. 86
19951
the offender had inflicted the injury. There is no support in this sample for the hypothesis that armed resistance provokes criminals into
82
attacking victims; this confirms the findings of prior research.
While only 14% of all violent crime victims face offenders armed
with guns,83 18% of the gun-using victims in our sample faced adversaries with guns. 84 Although the gun defenders usually faced unarmed
offenders or offenders with lesser weapons, they were more likely than
other victims to face gun-armed criminals. This is consistent with the
perception that more desperate circumstances call forth more desperate defensive measures. The findings undercut the view that victims
are prone to use guns in "easy" circumstances which are likely to produce favorable outcomes for the victim regardless of their gun use.85
Instead, gun defenders appear to face more difficult circumstances
than other crime victims, not easier ones.
Nevertheless, one reason crime victims are willing to take the
risks of forcefully resisting the offender is that most offenders faced by
victims choosing such an action are unarmed, or armed only with less
lethal weapons. Relatively few victims try to use a gun against adversaries who are themselves armed with guns. According to this survey,
offenders were armed with some kind of weapon in 48% of DGU incidents but had guns in only 18% of them.8 6
The distribution of guns by type in DGUs is similar to that of guns
used by criminals. NCVS and police-based data indicate that about
80% of guns used in crime are handguns,8 7 and the present study
88
indicates that 80% of the guns used by victims are handguns.
Incidents where victims use a gun defensively are almost never
gunfights where both parties shoot at one another. Only 24% of the
incidents involved the defender firing their gun, and only 16% involved the defender shooting at their adversary.8 9 In only 4.5% of the
cases did the offender shoot at the defender.90 Consequently, it is not
surprising that only 3% of all the incidents involved both parties
shooting at each other.
Among our sample cases, the offenders were strangers to the de82
supra note
86 Id.
87 U.S. BUREAU OF JUSTIc STATISTICS, supra note 26, at 83; U.S. FEDERAL BUREAU OF
INVESTIGATION, supra note 70, at 18.
[Vol. 86
Id. at Panel I.
1995]
If we consider only the 15.7% who believed someone almost certainly would have been killed had they not used a gun, and apply this
figure to estimates in the first two columns of Table 2, it yields national annual estimates of 340,000 to 400,000 DGUs of any kind, and
240,000 to 300,000 uses of handguns, where defenders stated, if asked,
that they believed they almost certainly had saved a life by using the
gun. Just how many of these were truly life-saving gun uses is impossible to know. As a point of comparison, the largest number of deaths
involving guns, including homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths
in any one year in U.S. history was 38,323 in 1991.97
WHO Is
INVOLVED IN DEFENSIVE
GuN UsE?
Finally, this Article will consider what sorts of people use guns
defensively, and how they might differ from other people. Table 4
presents comparisons of five groups: (1) "defenders," i.e., people who
reported using a gun for defense; (2) people who personally own guns
but did not report a DGU; (3) people who do not personally own a
gun; (4) people who did not report a DGU, regardless of whether they
own guns; and (5) all people who completed the full interview.
Some of the earlier gun surveys asked the DGU question only of
Rs who reported owning a gun. The cost of this limitation is evident
from the first two rows of Table 4. Nearly 40% of the people reporting a DGU did not report personally owning a gun at the time of the
interview. They either used someone else's gun, got rid of the gun
since the DGU incident, or inaccurately denied personally owning a
gun. About a quarter of the defenders reported that they did not
even have a gun in their household at the time of the interview. Another possibility is that many gun owners were falsely denying their
ownership of the "incriminating evidence" of their DGU.
97 NATIoNAL SAFTy CouNcn, ACCIDENT FACTS 11 (1994).
[Vol. 86
1995]
CONCLUSION
STATISTICS,
180
[Vol. 86
alleged gun defenders claimed to have shot their adversaries, and only
24% claim to have fired their gun. If large numbers of Rs were inventing their accounts, one would think they would have created
more exciting scenarios.
By this time there seems little legitimate scholarly reason to doubt
that defensive gun use is very common in the U.S., and that it probably is substantially more common than criminal gun use. This should
not come as a surprise, given that there are far more gun-owning
crime victims than there are gun-owning criminals and that victimization is spread out over many different victims, while offending is more
concentrated among a relatively small number of offenders.
There is little legitimate reason to continue accepting the NCVS
estimates of DGU frequency as even approximately valid. The gross
inconsistencies between the NCVS and all other sources of information make it reasonable to suppose that all but a handful of NCVS
victims who had used a gun for protection in the reported incidents
refrained from mentioning this gun use. In light of evidence on the
injury-preventing effectiveness of victim gun use, in some cases where
the absence of victim injury is credited to either nonresistance or
some unarmed form of resistance, the absence of injury may have actually been due to resistance with a gun, which the victim failed to
mention to the interviewer.
The policy implications of these results are straightforward.
These findings do not imply anything about whether moderate regulatory measures such as background checks or purchase permits would
be desirable. Regulatory measures which do not disarm large shares
of the general population would not significantly reduce beneficial
defensive uses of firearms by noncriminals. On the other hand, prohibitionist measures, whether aimed at all guns or just at handguns, are
aimed at disarming criminals and noncriminals alike. They would
therefore discourage and presumably decrease the frequency of DGU
among noncriminal crime victims because even minimally effective
gun bans would disarm at least some noncriminals. The same would
be true of laws which ban gun carrying. In sum, measures that effectively reduce gun availability among the noncriminal majority also
would reduce DGUs that otherwise would have saved lives, prevented
injuries, thwarted rape attempts, driven off burglars, and helped victims retain their property.
Since as many as 400,000 people a year use guns in situations
where the defenders claim that they "almost certainly" saved a life by
doing so, this result cannot be dismissed as trivial. If even one-tenth
of these people are accurate in their stated perceptions, the number
of lives saved by victim use of guns would still exceed the total number
1995]
of lives taken with guns. It is not possible to know how many lives are
actually saved this way, for the simple reason that no one can be certain how crime incidents would have turned out had the participants
acted differently than they actually did. But surely this is too serious a
matter to simply assume that practically everyone who says he believes
he saved a life by using a gun was wrong.
This is also too serious a matter to base conclusions on silly statistics comparing the number of lives taken with guns with the number
of criminals killed by victims. 10 0 Killing a criminal is not a benefit to
the victim, but rather a nightmare to be suffered for years afterward.
Saving a life through DGU would be a benefit, but this almost never
involves killing the criminal; probably fewer than 3,000 criminals are
lawfully killed by gun-wielding victims each year,1 1 representing only
about 1/1000 of the number of DGUs, and less than 1% of the
number of purportedly life-saving DGUs. Therefore, the number of
justifiable homicides cannot serve as even a rough index of life-saving
gun uses. Since this comparison does not involve any measured benefit, it can shed no light on the benefits and costs of keeping guns in
10 2
the home for protection.
100 Arthur L Kellermann & Donald T. Reay, Protection or PerilP, 314 NEw ENG. J. MED.
1557 (1986).
101 KLECK, supra note 18, at 111-117.
102 See id. at 127-129 for a more detailed critique of these "junk science" statistics. See
UNDERSTANDING AND PREVENTING VIOLENCE, supranote 15, at 267 for an example of a prestigious source taking such numbers seriously.
[Vol. 86
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A.
B.
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F.
G.
H.
GuN
USE INCIDENTSa
75.7
57.6
49.8
23.9
15.6
8.3
37.3
35.9
4.2
7.5
4.5
0.3
7.4
2.3
33.8
20.5
6.2
14.8c
8.2
30.4
9.5
11.0
46.8
32.3
15.3
5.5
15.3
83.5
1.3
51.9
48.1
13.4
4.5
17.8
2.0
9.9
5.9
4.5
26.2
3.1
38.5
40.1
1.1
6.4
13.9
J.
K.
[Vol. 86
73.4
8.3
1.3
1.0
1.0
0.0
0.5
3.1
4.2
7.3
47.2
26.1
17.6
4.0
5.0
20.8
19.3
16.2
14.2
15.7
13.7
64.2
Notes.
a. Table covers only defensive uses against persons, and excludes nine cases where respondents
refused to provide enough detail to confirm incidents as genuine defensive uses.
b. Percentages will sum to more than 100% because respondents could legitimately select or
report more than one category.
c. Only 3.7% of incidents involved trespassing as only crime.
1995]
187
Defenders
No-DGU
Gun owners
Non-owners
No DGU
All
Persons
59.5
79.0
47.3
19.3
12.9
46.8
100.0
100.0
23.3
4.5
1.9
29.3
0.0
16.3
2.1
4.9
2.0
18.3
23.9
36.3
7.3
4.9
2.1
21.5
25.5
37.9
8.8
5.5
2.5
22.5
8.2
27.5
23.2
42.0
5.2
24.1
28.2
42.5
8.9
33.4
22.7
35.0
8.2
31.5
23.8
36.8
8.2
31.2
23.9
36.6
77.0
72.4
75.2
53.7
69.7
85.2
78.9
75.4
50.0
65.8
71.5
37.1
55.0
70.5
74.0
46.4
55.8
70.6
74.0
46.7
25.7
36.9
20.6
14.2
2.6
10.2
21.6
26.8
30.6
10.9
14.3
22.6
25.2
25.9
12.1
13.1
22.1
25.5
27.3
12.0
13.5
22.6
25.4
26.8
11.7
72.4
16.8
8.0
2.8
90.3
5.1
3.2
1.3
83.0
9.7
4.9
2.4
84.6
8.6
4.6
2.2
84.1
8.9
4.8
2.1
32.5
29.8
25.5
12.2
14.7
32.2
28.1
24.9
24.7
27.7
32.6
15.1
22.2
29.4
31.3
17.2
22.6
29.3
31.1
17.0
50.8
0.6
15.3
33.3
69.1
2.2
10.9
17.8
57.5
6.5
11.2
24.8
60.5
6.2
11.8
21.4
60.1
6.0
12.0
21.9
12.3
30.1
22.2
18.6
7.9
8.8
2.4
7.4
23.2
30.3
17.8
12.1
9.2
4.9
15.3
27.9
23.0
20.0
8.0
5.8
2.0
13.6
26.9
24.5
19.2
8.9
6.8
3.2
13.5
27.2
24.4
19.2
8.9
6.9
3.1
Notl.r
a. "Defenders" are persons who reported a defensive gun use against another person in the
preceding five years, excluding uses in connection with military, police, or security guard duties.
This sample includes nine cases where such a use was reported, but the respondent did not
provide further details.
"No-DGU gun owners" are persons who report personally owning a gun but did not report a
defensive gun use.
"Nonowners" are persons who did not report personally owning a gun and who did not report
a defensive en use. These persons may, however, live in a household where others own a gun.
"No DGU are persons who did not report a defensive gun use, regardless of whether they
reported owning a gun.